The fourth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents another significant upping of the ante in the global debate on climate change – and, crucially, what should be done about it.

The report declares it unequivocal that the world is heating up beyond any natural cyclical variations, and that there is 90 per cent certainty that the phenomenon of climate change is caused by humans.

It already appears to be putting beyond doubt any remaining question marks over the need for a global consensus on measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impacts of global warming.

At the same time, it is also becoming more apparent that the only realistic “measures” available involve some system of firm caps on greenhouse emissions, allied with carbon market mechanisms to minimise the economic cost of restricting them.

The latest IPCC report can only increase the momentum towards a global reduction commitment and carbon market in some form or another. Its impact will ultimately be judged on its role in breaking the post-Kyoto deadlock over such instruments.

Last year, 2006, was a watershed in worldwide acknowledgement and awareness of global warming. Yet negotiations to extend international action begun under the short five-year Kyoto Protocol commitment period ending in 2012 are still yet to make any significant progress. They hinge on finding a way through an impasse which has the United States and the developing world holding out against a joint global commitment to place caps on emissions and establish a global carbon market.

The IPCC brings together the research and data of around 2500 scientists the world over in a painstaking five-year process of review before coming up with its assessments. It is the UN’s, and therefore the world’s, ultimate arbiter on climate change and its causes and the definitive scientific source by which policy is informed.

The Panel consists of representatives from 130 countries, all signatories of the UNFCCC, and the report needs the approval of their governments. That such decisive findings could emerge under such a wide body of stakeholders, and subject to such political influences, says a lot in itself.

Yvo de Boer, the head of the UNFCCC, the UN’s 189-nation climate convention, said the fourth assessment report had clearly dispelled the argument "that we do not know enough to move decisively against climate change."

"The findings, which governments have agreed upon, leave no doubt as to the dangers mankind is facing and must be acted upon without delay," de Boer said.

The big developing world emitters such as China, India and Brazil are unlikely to commit their economies to decisive action on emissions until all rich nations have done so. This reality was underlined by a Chinese official this week who told Reuters that highly industrialised nations bear the “unshirkable responsibility” for causing global warming. By one calculation, 80 per cent of human greenhouse emissions since the advent of the industrial revolution has come from developed nations.

Politically, therefore it is those Western governments holding out that are under the most political pressure from the IPCC report - Kyoto non-ratifiers the United States and Australia, and Kyoto waverers Canada.

The governments of these three countries were already under enormous pressure for change as 2006 ended – the Bush Administration by a new Democrat-controlled Congress, drought-ravaged and water-challenged Australia entering an election year, and Canada’s Harper government engaged in a heated national debate as it attempts to reset climate policy.

Already, there are some signs of movement in the positions of leaders in those countries, at least in terms of their rhetoric. Whether the IPCC report combines with domestic political conditions to force concrete policy change now becomes the focal point in the climate debate in 2007.

Ian Hamilton
carbonpositive


Related stories:
IPCC: Human hand in climate change
Anti-Kyoto leaders accept IPCC findings

IPCC links
Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis
Technical summary for policy makers [PDF 2.2MB]

IPCC website